Hume And Love

I felt kind of out-of-synch with the rest of the class today, and as we ended on kind of a 'downer' note today despite my optimism about Hume I feel compelled to explain myself a little, hopefully to someone's benefit.

There exists a tendency to think that Hume is kind of stealing away any hope for confidence or certainty in the world. John, especially, expressed this kind of distress which it's possible to take from Hume. But it doesn't have to be that way. This enquiry and our experiencing it isn't, to me, a cold separation of terms as with a scalpel, but instead it's more like a love story.

You know how in the Symposium there's the notion that you can't love something you already have? Well, I feel that when you think you have knowledge about something, you think you have the truth and so you aren't interested in truth anymore. Every new philosophy, book, or acquaintance is a potential enemy; every new idea presented to you must either be fit in with your current beliefs or summarily refuted. When you think you know something, it is expedient to run away from all new information, and to cower from (what I would call) truth, lest you fall prey to (what this person would call) deception or trickery.

But with the limits Hume places on human knowledge, you are deprived of possession of the truth. As a result you are free to love truth, and the things you formerly 'knew' are matters of belief. You can and ought to defend your opinions voraciously but if you perceive greater truth in some new argument, you can accept it without contradiction or shame. I perceive a great fear of being thrown into confusion or doubt among people who take pride in their knowledge (a la Descartes and the maelstrom). But if you are in love with truth, no confusion or doubt or new opinion can remove from you the joy of the seeking for truth in which you have engaged yourself. No change in belief can depress your emotions because it is your priority to be in love with truth, not to merely possess it. Loving the truth means confidence in belief, prudence (not reticence) in dealing with other beliefs, and a certain courage in dealing with new texts or ideas.

I'd even go so far to say that this love of truth is the entire point of PLS: to inject yourself with these books and these ideas, to let them really hit you, to temper yourself, test your mettle and see what emerges from the forge. It's my sentiment that what's so 'depressing' about Hume is that accepting what he's saying is to accept uncertainty. But if you give uncertainty with respect to knowledge a chance, you might find certainty with respect to love of truth to be much more challenging and rewarding.

If 'love' wasn't the right word to describe the seeking for truth, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have just made a fool/nerd of myself in front of people whose company I enjoy in class twice a week. I hope this benefited someone, or at least cemented their opinions by contrast with mine; and I hope this has made me and my apparent delight-in-lack-of-knowledge seem less, rather than more, crazy. If none of those succeed, at least here you can find a rationale for why Hume need not be paralyzing.